What's Love Got to Do With It?: Attraction, Evolution and Sex

The Mating Game Is a Team Sport

Joshua Ackerman
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Romantic relationship formation is a social enterprise involving both competitive and cooperative motivations. Here, we investigate novel forms of third-party cooperation that differentially promote women’s and men’s evolved mating goals. We find that women generally cooperate to build relationship thresholds and men generally cooperate to overcome these thresholds.

 
Subject Area: What’s Love Got to Do With It?: Attraction, Evolution and Sex